A Tragedy of Irish Proportions

The Freedom of the City

Politics makes most artists stupid—but not
Brian Friel.
"The Freedom of the City," written in 1973 and newly revived by the Irish Repertory Theatre, appears on the surface to be a fictionalized portrayal of "Bloody Sunday," the terrible afternoon in 1972 when British soldiers shot and killed 14 unarmed men at a civil-rights protest in Northern Ireland. But Mr. Friel has never been one to go in for the obvious, and "The Freedom of the City" has no more (or less) to do with Bloody Sunday than "All the King's Men" has to do with
Huey Long.
It is not so much a history play as a meditation on how politics can crush innocent people in the pincers of absurdity, and the Irish Rep's production, directed by
Ciarán O'Reilly
with a galvanizing blend of force and subtlety, is as wrenching as the play itself.

Mr. Friel signals his deeper purpose at the outset by setting "The Freedom of the City" not in 1972 but two years earlier. As his fictional protest unfolds, three marchers take cover from tear gas inside a nearby government building, where they discover to their astonishment that they're hiding out in the mayor's office. None of them is in any way militant, much less inclined to violence. Michael (
James Russell
) is an earnest, priggish activist for Catholic rights, Lily (
Cara Seymour
) is a good-natured but ill-educated mother of 11, and Skinner (
Joseph Sikora
) is a cynical ne'er-do-well drifter. As the three drink the mayor's whiskey and marvel at the fanciness of his furniture, the soldiers surrounding the building wrongly conclude that it has been occupied by 40 armed protesters, and no sooner do Mr. Friel's hapless characters come out with their hands up than they are cut down in a hail of gunfire.

ENLARGE

Cara Seymour in Brian Friel's 'The Freedom of the City.'
Carol Rosegg

The plight of these victims would make for a gripping evening in and of itself. But Mr. Friel, whose plays often combine no-nonsense fourth-wall realism with Brecht-style "presentational" dramaturgy, has cunningly allowed the story of what is happening outside the building to be told by other people. Foremost among them is the judge (
John C. Vennema
) in charge of the official inquiry into the shootings, a highhanded snob with a cut-glass accent who takes it for granted that Michael, Lily and Skinner were baying for blood. Also present are a guitar-toting IRA balladeer (
Clark Carmichael
) who is no less certain that they were "Irish heroes" who "showed the crumblin' empire what good Irishmen could be" and a smug American sociologist (
Christa Scott-Reed
) who assures us that they were rebelling against the rigors of life in "a class-structured, highly individuated, capitalistic society."

Mr. Friel's point, of course, is that none of this is true. His three victims are not pawns or symbols but ordinary people whose separate lives and collective demise cannot be meaningfully described, much less accurately explained, in the reductive language of ideology. And while he is not a quietist—his play is clearly a protest against both the madness of Bloody Sunday and the immiserating poverty in which his characters live—it is the genius of "The Freedom of the City" that Mr. Friel transcends the immediate by rising above politics to portray the killing of Michael, Lily and Skinner not as a mere public event but as a tragedy in the truest, fullest sense.

Sightings

The Irish Rep's revival is above all else a masterpiece of tightly unified staging and design.
Charlie Corcoran,
the set designer, has festooned the company's tiny 135-seat auditorium with barbed wire and painted its walls with slogans, and Mr. O'Reilly fills the aisles with gun-wielding soldiers who are rarely more than a foot or two from the audience.
M. Florian Staab,
the sound designer, and
Ryan Rumery,
who wrote the incidental music, rend the air with the heartless sounds of rising chaos. Only an ensemble of formidably talented actors could hope to rise above the maelstrom and give memorable performances, and Mr. O'Reilly has found just the right people for the job. You'd have to toss a coin to decide whether Ms. Seymour or Mr. Sikora is the star of the show, and either way you'd be wrong: This is the kind of production in which every element, the acting very much included, contributes equally to the total effect, which is nothing short of overwhelming.

New York theatergoers have just been blessed with the rare opportunity to see off-Broadway revivals of two of Mr. Friel's most important plays. (The other, TACT/The Actors Company Theatre's production of "Lovers," closed this week.) Taken together, they offer incontrovertible proof of his towering talent—and even if, like me, you're chronically allergic to political theater, Mr. Friel and the Irish Rep will show you that it's possible to make great art out of a great wrong.

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